In February 2000 Robert
Coover, who had once announced the arrival of hypertext to
the broad audience of the New York Times Book Review,
declared that the golden age of hypertext was over
(Literary
Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden
Age). One reason
according to Coover is that the web "has not been very
hospitable" to serious hyperfiction but has rather supported
superficial, opportunistic events: "It tends to be a noisy,
restless, opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce-driven,
chaotic realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen, and pretenders,
in which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be
heard or, if heard by chance, attended to for more than a
moment or two. Literature is meditative and the Net is riven
by ceaseless hype and chatter. Literature has a shape, and
the Net is shapeless."

Concerning the multimedial
web he states: "hypertext is now used more to access
hypermedia as enhancements for more or less linear
narratives [ ] the reader is commonly obliged
now to enter the media-rich but ineluctable flow as directed
by the author : In a sense, it's back to the movies again,
that most passive and imperious of forms." Coover notes the
"constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of
a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle".

Coover focuses upon the
threat of visualisation and employs three prejudices
concerning digital writing:

Digital writing has to
be structured non-linearlly.

The author has to give
up her power to the readers, who are oblidged to complete
the work and are transformed from couch potatoes into
mouse commanders.

Images and sound,
animation and technical effects are little more than
spectacle and gimmick.

Coover's message seems to be
clear: When literature goes multimedia, when hypertext turns
into hypermedia a shift takes place from serious aesthetics
to superficial entertainment. Don't get me wrong: What
Coover points out is indeed a problem of hypermedia. If the
risk of hyperfiction is to link without meaning, the risk of
hypermedia is to employ effects that only flex the technical
muscles. Of course, it is not enough to have nice images or
fancy animation. Effects are only justified insofar as they
convey a message. There are hundreds of examples that fail.
I will discuss three that may have succeeded.